Bonnie Burnard
Henry Holt ($25)

by Kiersten Marek

Bonnie Burnard's first novel is a good book, just as the characters are good people, who live in good houses. The Chambers clan seems better than most, able to handle the death of their mother by cancer without undue havoc, able to accept their father's remarriage and the birth of a new sibling. But as the novel progresses, its very goodness can begin to be a hindrance; it keeps the reader at a safe distance from these good people.

With heavy exposition, the narrative of A Good House often feels more like a well-versed family history than a novel. I say this with sincere respect, since it is a feat to chronicle over 50 years of family life. But telling a family's history is complicated. Whoever is doing the telling is bound to have his or her own blind spots, moments of the story they prefer not to delve into. Burnard's novel seems to do a similar dance of avoidance. The narrative steps back from its characters at critical moments, leaving them like unfinished sketches—unrealized and easily misunderstood. Consequently, the book left me with lots of questions similar to questions I have about people in my own extended family, questions which are not to be asked or answered, lest they threaten to destabilize or debunk. Why, for example, does Daphne refuse to marry Murray? She sleeps with him, bears his children, but in two of the few fully played-out scenes of the novel, she refuses his proposals. The only reason offered by the novel is Daphne's observation that Murray prefers love from a distance. This may be so, but it doesn't show how Daphne prefers love, and why, for the sake of her daughters if not herself, she does not seek a little institutional security.

Where the book lacks in its willingness to depict its often compelling characters more fully, it makes up for in some well-rendered scenes. Daphne falling and breaking her jaw in a neighborhood circus is riveting. Similarly, Burnard gives a connoisseur's attention to the lovemaking between many of the book's couples. She also spares nothing in portraying Daphne in confrontation with her ailing father, Bill. In the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease, Bill serves as a figure of tragicomic relief toward the end of the book, speaking, like a Court Jester, his most vile and base opinions. Of the father of Daphne's affairs resulting in her two daughters, Bill tells his daughter ruthlessly: "He took what he wanted, and you too stupid and ugly to deny him," to which Daphne replies in true Masterpiece Theater form, "You bastard. You God damned bastard."

As with any good house, this novel is filled with little charms, too. Burnard has a gift for carefully nuanced summations, with lines like "She turned on the tap and laid some Colgate along the bristles of her toothbrush." She also demonstrates an impressive understanding of life experience, and can summarize a person's 20-year-emotional career in one swift dash of the pen: "He'd had the words ready for a while, from the time his guilt had finally, and almost without his notice, transmogrified into the lesser sin of profound regret." And her metaphors, while not showy, are wonderfully rich, as in, "She watched him like you might watch an animal grooming himself in the dark of night."

Despite the mystery of Daphne's choice not to marry, in the end the story returns to her. Curiously, Burnard closes the novel with the marriage of Daphne's oldest daughter to an up-and-coming academic (like all good neo-Victorians, she knows that happy stories end with a wedding). Some of the final details about Daphne in this marriage chapter will keep readers pondering. Burnard tells of how Daphne raised her daughters on stories that only contained "the best words, the weird, strange, yummy words," but these stories always had the same revealing moral: "Be careful, children. You are all alone. Be very good or else."

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Ross King
Walker & Company ($26)

by Kris Lawson

Fans of The Name of the Rose will enjoy Ex-Libris, an unconventional bookish mystery. Books inform and consume the characters, who struggle to survive in the bleak England of post-Cromwell and the ravaged Europe of the Thirty Years War. From collections of dangerous books, the possession of which is enough to send the unlucky reader to prison or death, to covert book auctions in seedy wharfside London, Ex-Libris moves quickly as it weaves together two plots, linked by the search for a mysterious manuscript.

The first plot concerns the hero, a mild-mannered and nearly blind bookseller who discovers untapped reserves of persistence and bravery whilst aiding a mysterious noblewoman who lives in the midst of a decaying mansion filled with more books than furniture. The second follows three refugees fleeing the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire, smuggling crates of forbidden books from the Lutheran armies. Guarding the books are the obsessive librarian whose vocation is for cataloging; his lover who enjoys flouting convention by reading forbidden books; and the secret agent who doubles as secret book buyer for Emperor Rudolf, whose passion for magical and alchemical knowledge exceeds his military acumen.

Both stories converge with the search for the mysterious manuscript, The Labyrinth of the World, so rare that it has become legendary. Alchemy and secret societies, ciphers and invisible inks, mazes and secret passageways: Ex-Libris becomes conventional only in its plethora of plot devices—there's even a chase scene with boats racing down the Thames. Where King excels is in his historic scope: he demonstrates with heartbreaking regularity how censors as well as natural forces—here figured as waterways that facilitate murders, drown books and the sailors who smuggle them, and destroy the libraries they are meant to protect—can wipe out books in a matter of seconds, leaving only hints from other books to prove they ever existed.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Alvin Lu
Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)

by Peter Ritter

As a typhoon closes around the island of Taipei, hungry ghosts intermingle with the living, causing mischief and stealing souls with impunity. Meanwhile, a shape-shifting killer called K grips the island's already-fevered imagination. Is K real, or, like the comic-book stories of suicide and haunting that seem to be coming to life, a figment of mass delusion caused by the storm? Such is the mystery of Alvin Lu's luscious but perplexing debut novel, The Hell Screens, a noirish ghost story with too many ghosts and too little story.

Lu is a film critic and teacher, and his interest in cinematic technique and the subjectivity of the senses is much in evidence here. The novel's narrator, an amateur Chinese-American scholar of the supernatural, sees the spirit world through a contact lens, which, when soaked in tea, blurs and distorts his vision. His associate, a rotund amateur videographer who may or may not be the reincarnated spirit of a dissident film director, roams the halls of a haunted apartment building trying to capture the image of a female ghost. Throughout, glimpses of Taipei's glistening, crowded streets flash on the page like whispers on celluloid. "I saw myself no longer in contemporary Taipei, but in the ghost city on which it based itself, in its imagination, if cities dream down to the naming of streets. In some dark lit colonial gotham, the bodies of poets and spies floated, shot and dumped, through gutters and down rivers, while young women, smitten and deceived by the notion of romantic love, waited in hovels for their idealistic young men to return." Filtered through the novel's distorted lens, the city's subconscious landscape, formed by myth and populated by nightmares, becomes manifest.

Like its setting, the plot of The Hell Screens flows according to the discordant logic of a dream. Characters, both living and otherwise, flit through the narrative, guided by voices from beyond through the labyrinthine metropolis. Adding to the confusion, they metamorphose at random, becoming apparitions from manga one moment and flesh-and-blood people the next. A girl with a flower tattoo, for instance, appears variably as one of K's victims, an enigmatic medium, and the ghost of a suicide. Even the narrator becomes suspect; he may, in fact, be a figment of K's imagination. Lu drops clues throughout, including snippets of Buddhist philosophy about the illusory nature of the material world, which suggest that the novel's puzzles are, at heart, unsolvable. As in Kafka's stories—which, as the killer's name implies, seem to have inspired Lu—paranoia is the narrative catalyst. When nothing is as it appears, anything is possible.

Yet for all the richness of Lu's atmospherics, there is an absence at the center of The Hell Screens, as though the novel itself were nothing more than the feverish projections of an unquiet mind. Kafka's parables were, at least, grounded by their stylistic parody and subversive spirit; Lu's fantasia, bound by nothing, eventually drifts into a cul-de-sac of portentous signs, metaphysical musing, and overripe prose. Trying to follow the author on this head-trip, we're left feeling like Theseus lost in the labyrinth, with nary a narrative bread crumb to guide the way.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Doubleday ($23.95)

by Michelle Reale

Propelled by the conventional wisdom that what is unknown in our lives hurts and corrodes more than what we know, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest book of short stories subtly takes the possibility of good in our lives and gives it a little twist. Her human but flawed characters constantly err; they manage to find tiny pin pricks of redemption in situations that seem otherwise capable of laying the fragile human spirit to waste, but their "solutions" often become resignations.

In these nine short stories, Divakaruni focuses on the lives of women almost exclusively, no doubt traversing terrain both familiar and close to her heart. Males, when they do appear, are ancillary to the actual stories themselves, existing instead as shadowy or fragmented characters lending masculine scenery and staying close to the frayed edges.

In the opening story, "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," Divakaruni shows an aging Indian mother who has left India to live with her son and his family treading the rocky terrain of American culture. Culture shock would be putting it mildly; poor Mrs. Dutta cannot sleep comfortably on her "Perma Rest" American mattress, bought for her, with good intentions, by her aloof son and his increasingly inscrutable wife. Feeling like little more than a stranger in the house, Mrs. Dutta pens letters to her steadfast friend Roma in India. While her letters contain glowing accounts of American life, nothing could really be further from the truth. Her existence is painful and alienating. Here, Divakaruni explicates beautifully the preoccupation many immigrants have with living exemplary so-called "American" lives. Her son and his wife worrying over what the neighbor's think when Mrs. Dutta drapes her saris over the fence to dry is both poignant and amusing. Divakaruni's writing is both precise and contrived in this opening story, perhaps most realistically highlighting, at least to some sensibilities, the divide between East and West. While Mrs. Dutta brims with "smother love," tasty meals, and true involvement in the lives of the only family she has left, her efforts are spurned at every turn. Divakaruni is exceptional at slowly building a story line and quietly tearing it down in the end—an effect present in nearly every story in this collection, though to varying degrees.

Interestingly, two stories in the collection focus on brother and sister relationships; both stories place their female narrators in the familiar roles of conciliator and interpreter of emotions, not to mention the ever-present (ever needful?) mother figure to their brothers, irregardless of whether younger or older than themselves. In "The Intelligence of Wild Things" a sister attempts to heal an ever-growing rift between her brother and their mother before death intervenes. Because she cannot do this directly, the sister decides to implore her brother with a story, a fable of sorts, conceding that whether or not he "listens" and whether or not he "hears" is now a roll of the dice. She thinks to herself: "We stand side by side, shoulders touching. The wind blows though us, a wild intelligent wind. The white bird flies directly into the sun." This is a placid and surrendering image in sharp and violent contrast to the young brother and sister in "The Forgotten Children" who are alternately brutalized and loved, yet still fiercely loving of parents who fail to protect them in any fundamental way. Again, the sister attempts to forge a perverse sort of normality and shelter her younger brother, causing her to feel that "perhaps to disappear is the next best thing to being forgotten." Divakaruni describes the abuse of the children in matter of fact ways and this unemotional tone is unnerving, but achieves what she probably set out to do: enrage the reader before they even realize what is happening.

One might rightfully ask what the errors in our lives actually are. The book's epigraph, from Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother, states: "Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you." This collection does not illuminate, nor does it seek find humor in the crossing of cultures and the problem of situating oneself uncomfortably between East and West. Instead, it seems that the errors of our lives, whether known or unknown, are the great equalizers in these quiet and devastating stories. Divakaruni hits her emotional target every time, but rather than outright murder, she kills you softly—and you never see it coming.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Susan Coll
Simon & Schuster ($23)

by Julie Madsen

“I'm not a Marxist!" Coll's protagonist, Ella, exclaims repeatedly throughout the novel. It is the defining sentiment for the entire book, whose title could woo real champions of Marxist theory with its Marx-from-a-postmodern-perspective allusion. The book will probably not be such a disappointment for readers who are open to a quirky romantic tale with light overtones of political theory—an odd mix to be sure, but perhaps revolutionary in its own way.

Ella is a political theory student, nearly 30, who has chosen Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx's daughter, as her thesis subject—specifically, Eleanor's involvement with a married man, which Ella believes led to her debilitating depression and, ultimately, suicide. Ella's fascination with Eleanor's fate escalates as she discovers uncanny similarities to her own romantic life, although Ella is much less prone to suicide than to shopping her worries away.

While enmeshed in her romantic woes, Ella finds herself employed by a slightly unbalanced Marx enthusiast called the Colonel, who is bent on bringing Marxist thought back in vogue to modern-day masses via mementos such as "smiling Marx" T-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like, to be sold on a website that Ella is to construct. His ultimate goal is to have "people in America walking around speaking in Marxisms. You know, ‘Workers of the world, unite,’ that sort of thing, only more relevant and less threatening." Coll is not subtle with irony; she hypes it as flashily as the Colonel does his beloved bearded icon.

Ella, caught between becoming a dispenser of cheap trifles that inadvertently ridicule more than they promote Marxist thought, and dealing with her personal issues, personifies perfectly her generation's ambivalence toward the radicalism and militancy of the previous generation: When she hears a poem from a college twenty-something about revolution, introduced by his comment that "the time is ripe, I think," she ponders, "Was the time ripe for revolution, or for a poem about revolution, or maybe for a mail-order catalog about revolution?"

Karlmarx.com begins with the perfect epigraph, a quote from Marx himself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Coll’s book is a clear result of this phenomenon.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Fanny Howe
Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Series ($11.95)

by Christopher Martin

. . . the history of a head is unavoidable being everywhere

This is the history of the head of Henny: estranged wife, surrogate mother, and mothering friend. If you add to this list her intensely religious brand of atheism, it appears, clear as ether, Henny is very much on her own. She is an invisible energy that suffuses the life of (and lives in) the book. Paradoxically, what is invisible here is also indivisible—"unavoidable being everywhere." As a character, Henny lingers submissively behind a backdrop of silent concern. Her function as a narrator, however, is to hoist the entire structure of the novel onto her brittle, uneven shoulders and deliver all the embarrassing facts directly to us, her reader/God. In order to insure the honesty of this confession, Henny pledges to tell an inclusive story without the emotional duplicity of what she calls "sequence":

Sometimes I think that God witnesses events sideways and doesn't stop because it all goes by so fast, and God can't believe what God just saw. So it is important to tell you everything, God.

Where there is "everything" there is certain contradiction, and Howe delights in using it to her advantage. Henny is a poor, pale character of little personality in an alternatively rich, flamboyant, and colorful world. Although she describes her prose as employing a "forced lack of style," she often lapses into hauntingly lyrical stretches: "Sitting outside at night was like passing around a razor to shave a zebra down to its first shape. The black sky is really a weight, can hurt, so heavy a dump of stars, some falling all turning together bare naked between them. God planted the glass that grew language." Finally, after nearly 300 pages of fragment, quandary, and moral debate, the action returns right back to where it began: the story of a woman, her mostly unconsummated love, and the children (young and old) that she has protected and preserved. Only then do we realize the full breadth and beauty of the narrative Howe has surreptitiously constructed all along.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Nicholas Mosley
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Jason Picone

The difficulty of relating the disparate fields of literature and science, the invasiveness of technology in people's lives and the search for the mythical Garden of the Hesperides are all at the center of Nicholas Mosley's latest novel. Narrated by a nameless teenager, The Hesperides Tree is a brilliant fiction of ideas, supplying a multitude of theories and worldviews while ultimately deferring to the reader's judgment in how to best sort and decipher the book's plethora of information.

Like many of Mosley's novels, the characters in The Hesperides Tree are brainy and thoughtful aesthetes whose lives are engrossed in erudite debates and dilemmas. The male protagonist struggles to decide on a concentration in college, unable to discern whether natural science or literature is more likely to answer his soul-searching questions about his role in life. While the young Englishman decides to pursue literature, the choice fails to satisfy or solve anything, resulting in only more questions concerning why no academic discipline can seem to truly educate him. His friend scorns the impotence of the academy, arguing that "human beings can alter the world, but they don't do this by talking about it." The academy also fails to provide any advice to the protagonist on how to keep pervasive technologies from corrupting him, a constant worry that troubles him.

Though it has become commonplace for contemporary novelists to sound off on the increasing self-alienation that people suffer at the hands of technology, Mosley manages to infuse the subject with a fresh feel by including a number of nefarious new developments. In terms of the author's range, it's impressive that a man who is almost eighty can not only convincingly assume the first-person voice of a teenager, but can also write compellingly on how internet porn impacts his young protagonist's sexuality. The young man attempts to resist the seduction of pornography, but is fascinated as well as repulsed by it:

One could . . . embark on a laborious journey past advertisements and warnings and promotional lures until one reached a site where bums and breasts bloomed like exotic flowers and vegetables. . . Some of my schoolfellows had the use of credit-cards and by giving their numbers one could go deeper into the haunted forest with strange images of animals and ghouls and torture-chambers and children. But then it began to seem that the tendrils and roots of the forest were stretching down, round, up, to entrap one . . .

Beyond the lure of the internet, the narrator is disturbed by other technological advances; he reads reports of an experimental bio-weapon, the actual existence of which is unclear. The weapon kills only individuals with a certain genetic make-up, an ideal weapon for an aggressive party afraid of harming their own. Coupled with his fear of overt destruction is the looming millennium and its insidious bug, a techno-illness he likens to the bio-weapon. He believes both have the potential to silently infect and destroy, killing off choice peoples or systems while passing over others.

Unable to explain the world and its increasingly destructive tendencies through his studies, the narrator turns inward, searching first within himself, then reaching out to his family and friends for the enlightenment that has heretofore eluded him. On a trip with his family to western Ireland, he spies a young woman, Julie, with whom he immediately feels a deep connection. When chance eventually thrusts the two together, he wonders about the role coincidence plays in shaping lives and whether or not he has the power to control his destiny:

The idea that one lives in a world of potentialities amongst which one has the ability if not exactly to choose then at least to be aware of the possibility of choice . . . and by this to make available one thing rather than another . . . this was a fancy that it had seemed to me one might take note of like a beautiful stranger passed in the street: but what would it be to possess it, experience it, live with it as if it were normality?

Eventually, he and Julie journey to an island that may or may not be the Garden of the Hesperides, a mythical, Eden-like realm. There they discover what they suppose to be the Tree of Life, though they realize they might be mistaken. The young couple wonders whether it makes any difference whether they are actually in a mystical place or are simply forcing the myth's actualization. Such thoughts lead them to question the role myth-making plays in everyday life; ultimately, both deem it to be a useful practice that confers power back upon the individual, giving one the ability to choose his or her individual fate, while at the same time drawing upon the world's shared mythologies.

The back of The Hesperides Tree mentions, somewhat ominously, that it is "quite possibly the last" novel that Mosley will write. Appropriately, one of the characters observes that, "If it's become a business of not being able to put things into words, then what's the point of going on saying this? . . . Writers don't seem able to put what life's like into words." If it is to be his last novel, Mosley's latest is a worthy epilogue to a career that spans fifteen works of fiction and fifty years. The novel's closing words, "Stop talking," are a wonderful conclusion for a writer that has so frequently observed the difficulty in communicating one's thoughts via speech or writing. A fitting finale for such a humanistic artist, The Hesperides Tree investigates the individual's relationship to humankind, munificently lending a number of possible methods for living both with oneself and the world.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
Haruki Murakami
translated by Philip Gabriel
Knopf ($23)

by Matt Dube

Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, tells the story of two would-be lovers. Sumire, a frustrated novelist and college dropout, meets the thirty-something Miu at a wedding reception, and falls immediately in love with the older woman. When Miu offers Sumire a job as her assistant, Sumire leaps at the chance and allows Miu to remake her tattered beatnik self into a completely organized aide-de-camp. The two vacation in Greece after a trip to Europe to arrange the year's sales for Miu's wine importing business. There, they make their first steps toward physical love, but the next day, Sumire disappears to "the other side." The narrator is called in by Miu to help find Sumire, and his attempts to understand what might have led her to that extreme brings him close to crossing over himself. This is classic Murakami territory, the fizzle of frustration with a world that just can't array itself right, and the erotic longings all three characters feel have a direct, physical weight.

Take, for example, the following passage, about the way Sumire describes her feeling for Miu:

"There was this article in the paper the other day," Sumire said, completely oblivious. "It said lesbians are born that way; there's a tiny bone in the inner ear that's completely different from other women's that makes all the difference. Some small bone with a complicated name. . . . I can't get the idea out of my mind of this little good-for-nothing bone inside my ear. Wondering what shape my own little bone is. . . . When I'm with her that bone in my ear starts ringing. Like delicate seashell wind chimes."

The first third of the book, tracing Sumire and Miu's early courtship, is filled with similarly odd episodes and digressions that highlight Murakami's casual mastery of narrative drift. Later, the overlapping narratives of Sumire's dreams and her conversations with Miu on the Greek Island are dizzyingly subtle, and the strange situation the narrator encounters when he returns from Greece is marvelously understated. In other places, though, Murakami is less satisfying: his record of the Greek Island's recent history is banal, and his attempts to describe the passage of the world where Sumire has gone to meet the perfect version of her lover is heavy-handed and stubbornly un-nuanced. This tale of disappearances is one Murakami returns to frequently in his fiction—as early, in fact, as his first novel translated into English, A Wild Sheep's Chase. But he still hasn't mastered that story here, pushing his language up against what cannot be articulated with feet less fleet than flat.

Murakami's novel is at its best when dealing with thwarted desire and the inability to make things work as they should. It is easy to sympathize with the dream of connecting with someone more perfectly than is possible on this material plane, but in this novel that doesn't seem an entirely viable option. Sumire's possible return at the book's close is well handled, and the frustrated epilogue that greets the narrator on his return to Japan is a powerful reminder that it is not only lovers who cannot connect. Like much of Murakami's longer work, Sputnik Sweetheart comes close to giving his readers the transcendence he offers his characters, but then tellingly forces us to stay right here.

UNDERGROUND: THE TOKYO GAS ATTACK AND THE JAPANESE PSYCHE
Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel
Vintage Paperback ($14)

by Jennifer Flanagan

Haruki Murakami is perhaps best-known for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both complex, intricate novels. In his first non-fiction book, he connects the motifs in his novels—subterranean worlds, convoluted plots—to the theme of Underground.

As in Murakami's fiction, there are many levels to the book. On the surface, it is a series of interviews with victims and victims' family members, followed by interviews with members and former members of Aum Shinrikyo, the sect that carried out the Toyko gas attack. But Underground is more than a powerful forum for people to tell their stories; it also functions as a commentary on Japanese society; an examination of the Japanese psyche; a rebuke of the way in which the media handles tragedy—easily applicable to the United States; and finally, a reminder that this could happen again. Murakami deftly tries to get at the heart of why and how it happened, and compares the Aum followers to Ted Kaczynski; he probably would have included Timothy McVeigh had the book been written after the Oklahoma City bombing.

The insight he offers into Japanese society is considerable. Just the description of a normal commute gives an incredibly vivid sense of Tokyo—trains so crowded that one man speaks of having his briefcase "swallowed up in the torrent of people and swept away. . . . I just had to [let go] or my arm would have been broken. The case just disappeared." During just such a rush hour on March 20, 1995, liquid sarin was released on three trains. The nature of sarin is that once it gets into your clothes, anyone who comes near you is also poisoned from the vapors. Over five-thousand people were treated for sarin gas poisoning, and twelve people died. Many of the survivors continue to experience serious after-effects, from paralysis and loss of speech to constant headaches, loss of vision, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Murakami's desire was to give a clear sense of these victims as people; he provides a brief background sketch of each one, allowing their stories to wander from the personal to the political and back again, telling us that "perhaps it's an occupational hazard of the novelist's profession, but I am less interested in the ‘big picture,' as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual."

One interesting effect of having the stories placed side-by-side is that they often contain small inconsistencies. Murakami acknowledges this, explaining that he "endeavored to maintain the basic stance that each person's story is true within the context of that story . . . As a result, the stories told by different people who . . . experienced the very same scene often differ . . . but they are presented here with all their contradictions preserved. Because it seems to me that these discrepancies and contradictions say something in themselves. Sometimes . . . inconsistency can be more eloquent than consistency."

When explaining why they didn't offer to help or flee the stations themselves as they witnessed passengers falling down around them, more than one person echoed the comments of Yoko Iizuka: "I knew it was an emergency, but to be honest it didn't occur to me that it was anything really serious. I mean, what can happen? Japan's a supersafe country, isn't it? No guns, no terrorists . . . It never occurred to me that I might be in danger or that I had to get myself out of there." She was one of many passengers who proceeded to her office, finally going to the hospital three hours after being poisoned.

Hospitals had no idea there had been a gas attack, and even after they learned what happened, they often had no idea how to treat victims. One hospital alone received over a thousand patients. Survivors complained of the lack of emergency response, but Nobuo Yanagisawa, the doctor who had treated victims from an earlier sarin attack (Aum had planted sarin one year prior to the Tokyo attack, referred to as the Matsumoto incident, which killed seven people) commented that "to have had five-thousand sarin gas victims and only 12 dead is close to a miracle." Yanagisawa spent the day faxing his findings from that first attack to hospitals across the region. Even so, he remarked "it's almost unthinkable that a doctor would go out of his way to send unsolicited information to a hospital. The first thought is never to say too much, never to overstep one's position. But with the gas attack I had other motives too. One of the seven victims who died in the Matsumoto incident was a medical student here at Shinshu University. . . . That simple fact kept me going."

Murakami refuses the ease of an "us and them/good and evil" attitude, instead exploring what it is in each of us that is reflected in the actions of these home-grown terrorists. His ability to look deeply and honestly at the culture that allowed Aum followers to become so disenfranchised they turned on their own country is both instructive and uncomfortable, especially in the light of our own terrorist incidents. It is also very necessary if we are to learn anything from such tragedies.

Click here to purchase Sputnik Sweetheart at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Underground at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

LOUISE IN LOVE
Grove Press ($13)

THE DOWNSTREAM EXTREMITY OF THE ISLE OF SWANS
University of Georgia ($15.95)

by Bonnie Blader

Any single short discussion of Mary Jo Bang's two new books, both published in the Spring of 2001, will only scratch their rich surfaces. Bang deploys her own signature language of perspective, using it so successfully across the span of both books that the reader is invited to intuit its logic and learn to read her. It is "a language / of tongue rolls and lip twists," to borrow from the poem "To Dance the Tarantella," from Downstream Extremity. Alliteration is a fundamental feature; consonants thrust up in her voice stream like stones, turning the current back on itself. "It is from that in water we were from," Robert Frost says in "West Running Brook," "long, long before we were from any creature." Perhaps this explains the appeal of her technique. It invites sensory validation before cognitive sense is even broached.

Nearly a novel in verse, Louise in Love is also a sonic celebration. Sprung rhythms, iambic verse, and created words dance lightly along an upper crust of an invented world. Poems appear mostly in three-line stanzas or flush-left, ragged-right blocks; there is also a single prose poem, named for the title character. The forms affect their emotional density. Bang renders the world of Louise being in, playing with, and suffering love. The arc of her experience is a somewhat surrealistic bumper car journey—a image, in fact, that appears in the book, as does "Yves Tanguy walking a panther."

The collection's cast of characters, one mysteriously called "the other" to whom Louise sometimes turns for grounding or direction, call up an admittedly eclipsed world, one of a "hike to the hillock," "frou-frou," " pretty," "wonder," and "games." This gestured world is evident even in the mannered titles of poems, keeping before us an awareness of artifice that is both a part of the story of love and a part of its hyper-conscious presentation. We invest in the world of the "Dramatis Personae" at the same time we are aware that the story itself is scrutinized. The question of which is most artificial, the created world or the commentary, seems to be an issue the poet herself is happy to raise.

Bang's narrative is remarkably illusive, what the aptly chosen image and apt ear do in collusion. It feels like it's there and it moves: "Lighter, liminal, quite likely / to follow a line completely lacking in depth." ("Like a Fire in a Fire") The three line stanzas that predominate seem part of the narrative illusion, saying beginning, middle, and end repeatedly, but the created world is here thanks to fragmentary images and an achievement of tone created by pace and diction. It is built as if with mirrors artfully set to allow corners to imply whole rooms. So much depends on sound, word texture, and Bang's Hopkins-esque ease: "a hive hum ongoing in the hear ear." She revels in the aural geography of language as formalist painters do in paint, where color is the story, and the stroke composition. From the prose poem "Louise":

Depiction, she said, surfacing in order to say it and fracturing the spell under which they swam in the moment that ended an eon ago. Swans, she said, referring to the needle-neck birds black and white that lined the aisle down which one walked to get to the river on which they were skating away.

Keats is referenced in borrowed italicized lines in a few poems, but it is Woolf who feels more at its heart, as if she is dreaming and this collection is the fragmented warp of her dream. The Woolf-ian sensibility is so pervasive--a line from Mrs. Dalloway even appears in "That Was All, Louise Said, Except For"—that it is a welcome release when Louise appears in one poem with a copy of Mrs. Dalloway in hand.

If narration is at play in Louise in Love, it is perception that is the preoccupation of The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. On what does perception depend—the ordering/disordering mind or the glimpsed external? The book is divided into three sections, the last not a poem cluster but a high-speed, paragraphed collection of fragments called "Origin of the Impulse to Speak," a biography told in shaping impacts and images. Of course, the subjectivity of the eye is inherent in what one defines as one's life; in the first two sections of the book, among discrete poems, a rough count of words directly referring to sight (see, view, sight, eye) yields 65 instances in 53 pages. Bang is not invested in continuous or traditional narrative (although the poems are populated with personae), but in considering an equilibrium, a territory of influence, between interior and external conditions with the eye—"Poor eye, she said, from the off-center door of her head"—a manipulated vehicle. The eye influences: "the mind is made by eye," and is in turn used, "O the idea of order. It will be seen through."

As in Louise in Love, Bang calls up other poets. Samuel Beckett's "Ohio Impromptu" drives the title; Richard Howard and John Yau loan her lines. But it is a quality in Wallace Stevens's work, his extravagant images, his disinclination for standard narration, and the primacy he grants the imagination over the other reality at its command, that Bang might claim as her tradition. She gives us interior convictions in these poems using artifact images from an exterior reality also, one feels, mostly imagined—"the manhandled grammar of nature," as she says in "Pear and O, an Opera"—as their correlative or proof. What she achieves is no less than a realignment of language to address uniquely felt places. From the title poem:

In the window a jacket cried, Wear me, wear me,
on a street of tall houses, all showing teeth (ash white of ice rut,
of water on rock)—
many their eyes, all shaded by marmalade hoods. O cobra.

I was foreign then, living in a limited range.

Reading across both books, we become aware that Bang echoes herself. Certain images and particular words are repeated. Swans are needle-necked in both books. The word "sliver," usually used in conjunction with light or silver, recurs. One senses a certain insistence on the nature of the natural world on her part, and the press of an idea being offered to us again and again. Bang's aesthetic also conjoins the ancient or archaic with contemporary references: "It's time for the feasting that follows the four men it took / to carry the dead monster's head," begins "Stone, Montana." We hear of pipers, revellers, ringbolts, cigarettes and satellites. We are in all worlds and no known world at once, in all times and no sure time, and must make our own maps as we read. Mary Jo Bang's achievement is in having something wholly there, a language and a philosophy to investigate. Her work teaches us how it will speak. Before we may fully grasp her intricacies, our senses are taken by what is meant.

Click here to purchase Louise in Love at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Raymond Federman
Starcherone Books ($9)

by Rebecca Weaver

The particular story of Raymond Federman's The Voice in the Closet cannot be told conventionally. Originally part of his third novel The Twofold Vibration, this book was excerpted by request of Indiana University Press, who called the section "unreadable." It's fortunate that Federman found another home for the section, because this short book does something hugely innovative: it conflates the known conventions of how we talk and write, since in this case, those conventions no longer serve what needs to be said.

What needs to be said in this book is that survival is possible. The book's journey toward survival is powerfully conveyed on two levels. The first is that of the physical event itself. In a looping, elliptical way, readers come to discover that a boy has been locked into a closet. His mother and father, knowing that the Nazis are coming, hide the boy and escape with their daughters. Sadly, the only one who survives is the boy; he eventually escapes to America and becomes a writer. This is where the second level intersects with the first. The boy becomes the writer Federman, but The Voice in the Closet is spoken in the voice of the boy, who is angry and confused at the way his story has been twisted and retold by the writer: "he failed to generate the real story in vain situates me in the wrong abode as I turn in a void in his obligation to assign a beginning . . ."

There is a struggle for primacy between the two voices, and as the struggle is played throughout the book, the nature of stories and how we tell them is interrogated by the constant probing of memory. After all, whose story is it? The boy's, with whom the experience originated, or the adult Federman's, who has worked to tell the story? It is in this place where fact and memory collide that another sort of oppression takes place, and the inability to make sense of it renders the boy Federman "voiceless." The only way to survive it is to escape a mother tongue that has become fraught with grief and terror, in the same way that the poet (and fellow Holocaust survivor) Paul Celan's mother tongue became for him problematic. The English language, however, is punched through with pitfalls of its own, giving the writer Federman his own linguistic conundrum: "expelled from mother tongue exiled from mother land tongueless he extracts words from other tongues to exact his speechlessness . . ." Thus, conventional language is not adequate for the job of relating the horrific event that begins the journey. The lack of punctuation throughout The Voice in the Closet further underscores the breathless and unrelenting travels between past and present, memory and story.

This book asserts that the only way we can negotiate our histories and our memories is through the acts of telling (and re-telling) those stories. Survival exists in this kind of vigilant effort. The boy begins to forgive the writer, realizing that he, too, can speak, and that the act of speaking—for both Federmans—negates absence and creates hope. Silence is too costly. In the act of speaking, of telling the story again and again, "spring wells up at last."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001